Airliner Repair, 24/7 (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Airliner Repair, 24/7 (2008)

airspacemag.com

47 pointswallflower12 comments

I wrote about another company in the aerospace industry that serves a niche, the people that deal with crashes:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-company-you-have-never-heard-o...

I am surprised by your comment: "After a year I still haven’t found a way to adapt their model to the IT world"

I have worked in "disaster recovery" modes within a larger group of companies (think "Berkshire Hathaway" large), where we were basically meeting regularly to discuss opportunities, new findings and, above all, knew each other phone numbers & area of expertises.

There were basically no issues wtr to the business model, as we were all owned by the same company and when were working in "commando/disaster mode" shit had hit the fan furiously enough for noone to care about the costs. That may have simplified the things a great deal...

To me, Kenyon (and a few other players in their fields) is nothing more than an on-call, dependable team of experts with pre-set rates and a yearly fee for availability. I know for a fact that companies dealing in IT security do have such contracts (there's been numerous articles in the press about the Maersk disaster a few months/years back) and would expect that services similar for every aspects of IT ("our billing system has been offline for the past 13 hours", "our main DC has just been destroyed by an earthquake" and so on...)?

What have been the blockers you stumbled upon?

The fact that range of downsides is pretty much unlimited, and that customers are unwilling to recognize that until the moment arrives. In the airline business crashes are a statistical thing, but in IT everybody seems to think that disasters only happen to other operators.

You're in fact absolutely right.

I've had countless encounters with C-level execs who could recognize that if theur point of sales software was down, it meant a loss of x M€/day, or that if this SCADA system crashed it meant casualties within the work force. They could be rational enough to attach a price tag to these events

Despite this, it always went back to "yeah but last time my computer crashed, little Timmy fixed it, it's a no brainer, and my IT director has these things called backups".

The same people have contingency plans for anything non digital (including services like Blackwater guys or kenyon and so on), but digital has "no real consequences".

I hoped the Maersk disaster of last year would lead to a change of mind, but unfortunately we're not there yet.

“We’ve literally had passengers with tickets in their hands looking out the window of the gate at us as we were boxing up our equipment to leave”

I do hope this is only after minor repairs, and that after taking apart and reassembling an airframe the plane first goes up and comes down again with only a test pilot/crew.

I boarded an international flight (KLM to AMS) once and we taxied out and lined up for takeoff. The pilot then came on and said there was a mechanical issue and we'd have to go back to the gate.

We then sat on the plane for several hours while a crew (replaced|repaired) the APU. It was pretty disconcerting to be sitting there and hearing the drilling and grinding emanating from the hold and reverberating throughout the plane.

This was in 2000, so my memory is a bit vague but I do recall taxing out at one point, pushing up the power and then powering back down and returning to the gate for more work.

When the repairs were finally done, we immediately took off and made it across the Atlantic safely. It was one of the stranger air travel experiences I've had.

I’d suspect a lot of those change and go scenarios are backup/redundancy failure. Probably could have made it on a single, but thank god we have regulations saying hell no.

Discounting the fact that a 'successful test flight' probably isn't useful data, the equipment would of course only be packed away after the repairs have been tested and signed off.

> a 'successful test flight' probably isn't useful data

Actually, a test flight is the gold standard in aviation for return to service.

I've done maintenance test flights for operators. Basically you read the maintenance logs and do a test flight to exercise whatever was changed.

The Delhi accident mentioned appears to be this: https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19880724-...

Great database! Thanks.

> I suggested that future airliners made of advanced impact-resistant materials might never become tomorrow’s AOGs, Bruce Rund had a prediction of his own. “Somebody will figure out a way.”

Definitely, like this 787 repair

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ethiopian-787-flying-a...

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